Ati Mobility FireGL V5000 vs. Ati Mobility Radeon X700 (HL2)

I'm trying to decide what notebook to get for an all-round entertainment purpose. I'm looking for a 15,4" Centrino laptop that has longetivity when it comes to games, although not hardcore-game-longetivity. The two options I have right now are Acer TM8104 and HPNW8240. Acer is more of a multimedia/entertainment notebook and HP with its Thinkpad-like looks is more of a business/CAD notebook.

The main difference between these two is the graphics card. Acer has Ati Mobility Radeon X700 128MB and HP has Ati FireGL V5000 128MB which I'm told is a CAD/Workstation version of the X700 (or similar to it anyway). Now this is where things get interesting. Acer opted to uses DDR1 memory in its Ati Mobility Radeon X700 although Ati states in its website that Mobility X700 does support DDR3 memory. Apparently Acer did this (DDR3-> DDR1) to prevent extra heat. On the other hand, HP's FireGL V5000 apparently uses DDR3 memory (or so I've heard). This, I guess, would make FireGL V5000 the better gaming GPU.

HP NW8240 did get a higher 3DMARK05-score than Acer (although HP had 0,5GB more of RAM than Acer). I'm still a little concerned whether FireGL V5000 is suitable for gaming, especially when I'm not using the notebook for CAD-applications, business or graphic designing. I'm just trying to buy the best notebook for HL2 (a notebook which is 15,4" Centrino).

BTW: If someone reads this they comment on this other problem as well. It's come to my attention that HP NW8240's keyboard is designed so that you can't have more than two simultanious keypresses. I might be wrong but isn't this a problem if playing a game like Half-Life 2. You know, you run, duck and jump at the same time, and I don't do any of those things with my mouse.

Actually, in Acer TM8104, it DOES NOT. This is a quate from the firingsquad.com review:

"In use, the TravelMate 8100 was quite speedy thanks to its Pentium M processor and MOBILITY RADEON X700 graphics. Acer sticks pretty close to the specs of the MOBILITY RADEON X700 reference board we tested, clocking the VPU in the TravelMate 8100 at 357MHz on the graphics core (7MHz higher than stock) and 297MHz on the memory (53MHz below stock). We honestly weren’t surprised to see the memory running a little lower than default, as Acer elected to use cheaper DDR1 memory for the TravelMate 8100, rather than GDDR3 (which generates less heat than previous memory types)."

You can read the whole review in
here

I know that in Ati's webpage it is told that X700 does support DDR3, but apparently manufacturers can choose whether to use DDR1, DDR2 or DDR3 memory. Acer uses DDR1.

A guy called Tommi told me this. He has HPNW8240 reviews in this forum. I think this thing applies to only numbers, letters and space. Tommi told me that this does not apply to Shift or Control. I'm not really sure, though. All I know is that if you can't use combonation like A, W and space in a shoot 'em up you may be in trouble.

I'm also a little upset that Acer did not use DDR3 memory in X700. It would have given a bit more longetivity to the TM8100-models. However, when you look at benchmarks, the DD3 memory apparently does not make a huge difference. If you look at 3DMARK05 scores, HP's NW8240 notebook, which is essentially the same as Acer but has FireGL V5000 GPU (which I'm told is really a CAD-version of the X700) that DOES USE DDR3 memory got a score of 2430 (albeit with 0,5GB of more RAM than Acer) while Acer TM8104 got 2270. That's not a huge difference at all. So probably if Acer used DDR3 memory in its X700 (and had 1,5GB of ram instead of 1GB), the increase in 3DMARK05 would only be 160.